HACKER Q&A
📣 baobabKoodaa

Simple solutions to backup personal data


Which simple backup solutions can you recommend for backing up personal data?

I've been doing backups manually because after losing my data a few times (in the distant past) I've been too paranoid to trust any backup software / services. Then again, manually doing backups is error-prone as well, as you might simply forget to copy something, or you might accidentally move files instead of copying them. Data size (due to duplication) is becoming a pain point as well.

Some solutions recently recommended on HN are Borg and Restic. Borg doesn't appear to support Windows. I was really excited about Restic, but then I found some "traps" in the documentation that make me hesitant to use it; I don't want to become an expert in the internals of the backup software, I just want some simple software that I can use with confidence that it's not going to break on me. As an example of a trap in Restic, it will fail to make incremental copies of the same file if the file system modification timestamp and size of the file have not changed (it will simply keep the first version of the file). I've noticed that TrueCrypt containers behave like this on Windows (the file system modification date and size remain the same even though the contents change). This means that Restic will silently fail to backup TrueCrypt containers, while simultaneously pretending to the user that the backup was successful. I don't want to use any backup software that has traps like this.

Basically, I just want simple backup software that deduplicates data, allowing incremental backups over time, and doesn't have any traps that might cause accidental data loss. Does software like this exist?


  👤 gesman Accepted Answer ✓
Here's what i do:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ce1cbg/beginne...

1. RelioSync for mirroring all data from multiple places into single place

2. DrivePool is a centralized local storage for everything

3. Arq Backup send everything on schedule to Wasabi cloud.

Above strategy supports (but not limited to) Windows, versioning, undelete protection, local storage resiliency (multiple local drives could contain multiple copies of important stuff), client-side encryption, cost-efficient offsite backup.


👤 mikebos
I use Arq on my windows machine, there are no traps that I'm aware off. On my linux machine i use rclone to sync the data with s3. Had no issues what so ever with getting stuff back.

👤 janci
I use rsync, it is incremental but does not deduplicate.